1,000,000 Face Shields by Boston Scientific

Something Labs is many things, and one of our greatest hopes as an organization is to play the role of catalyst, to help spark and inspire and facilitate others to do something.

In March we connected with our friend Alissa Brandon. As a project manager at Boston Scientific, she had wondered what Boston Scientific was doing to join the fight against COVID-19. The R&D facilities were quickly slowing down. Did they have N95 masks that could be donated to the facilities that needed the most? It turns out they did.

Alissa reached out to us, and through our connection with GetUsPPE, we were able to help Boston Scientific distribute hundreds of N95s to local hospitals with greatest need.

We then began talking about how we could work together. Alissa recognized that the face shield prototypes Something Labs was working could be manufactured in the Boston Scientific facilities that had been closed by regulation. This would also keep their workers employed by transitioning to filling emergency need.

What was next? 

We then began talking about how we could work together on a broader project. Alissa recognized that the face shield prototypes Something Labs was building could be manufactured in the Boston Scientific facilities that had slowed production. How could we do this together? How would Something Labs help? We could provide the designs and source materials and the Boston Scientific could provide the labor. Something Labs had hoped to make as many as 500 per day. As Alissa began to work on the project internally at Boston Scientific, the organization realized that they could work within the scope of current partnerships-- existing material supply chains and infrastructure-- to make the work go even faster.

Quickly, Boston Scientific was off to the races. 

Alissa submitted a project charter and it was approved the following day, “It ended up being 8 days between our first meeting with Something Labs and us first building our own fully assembled shields,” she told us. For the record, the normal process of product development of this type often takes as long as 8 months!

Boston Scientific collaborated with vendor partner Prent Thermoform who had already modified an open source design for face shields, and began manufacturing at 3 sites with a goal of building 40,000 shields. After their first day, the three sites had already produced 3200 shields. “‘We actually had our initial estimate wrong,” says Alissa, “we were way faster than we thought we were going to be.

“Normally you have a product development line at one manufacturing site. We already had triple the amount of expertise...these different manufacturing engineers across the coast were able to collaborate with each other to get the speed [of production] as efficient as we could be.” Soon, they expanded from 3 production sites to 12, and rapidly increased production, making 100,000 shields a day in their peak!

After just 26 production days, on May 7, 2020 Boston Scientific hit the 1,000,000 face shield mark, with 300 people assembling shields, and over 150 members involved on core teams. This was the fastest ramp up to 1,000,000 medical devices that Boston Scientific had ever done. 

The entire distribution was handled through Get Us PPE, to ensure equity of the donations (there are rules around medical device manufacturers donating directly to hospitals, so Get Us PPE’s involvement made it all possible).

As of last week, Boston Scientific had produced over 1,075,000 shields, and Get Us PPE is still distributing these to the medical institutions most in need. 

Alissa is humble about her own contribution to the project she spearheaded, “What really happened here was the magic of collaboration, one idea building on another. It doesn’t have to be this fully fledged, perfect idea just out of the oven, you start, and you get better incrementally little by little until you reach something amazing.”

This idea and project exemplify the spirit of Something Labs. Join together to grow, influence, learn and the opportunity for impact swells. Together we can always do so much more.